Network medicine.

FEBS Lett. 2008 Apr 9;582(8):1266-70. Epub 2008 Feb 20.

Pawson T, Linding R.

To more effectively target complex diseases like cancer, diabetes and
schizophrenia, we may need to rethink our strategies for drug
development and the selection of molecular targets for pharmacological
treatments. Here, we discuss the potential use of protein signaling
networks as the targets for new therapeutic intervention. We argue that
by targeting the architecture of aberrant signaling networks associated
with cancer and other diseases new therapeutic strategies can be
implemented. Transforming medicine into a network driven endeavour will
require quantitative measurements of cell signaling processes; we will
describe how this may be performed and combined with new algorithms to
predict the trajectories taken by a cellular system either in time or
through disease states. We term this approach, network medicine.